Covid-19 puts workers in danger. It's another reason we need unions

[Hermit-The-Prog]

by Steven Greenhouse
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/24/covid-19-workers-dangers-unions

n May, workers at a McDonald’s in San Francisco said that when they asked their employer for masks, they were told to use coffee filters instead. In April, at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, a workers’ representative told me they only saw two hand sanitizers for the facility’s 5,000 employees. A Walmart worker in New Orleans said in April that several cashiers were sent home without pay for refusing managers’ orders to stop wearing masks, after some shoppers interpreted it as a sign they had Covid-19.

Some financially stretched retail workers say they were all but forced to go to work sick because their companies didn’t give paid sick leave for Covid-19 unless they first had a test showing they had contracted the virus, and in many places it was extremely hard to get tested.

Alarmed about the spread of Covid-19, health officials in Colorado criticized the JBS meatpacking company for having a “work while sick” culture. At a Mom’s Organic Market in Philadelphia, workers voiced alarm that their store was experiencing abnormally high sales volume, but little was being done to limit the crowding.

For many frontline workers, one of the most maddening aspects of the pandemic is that their employers have often ignored their concerns and suggestions about health and safety, even though workers arguably know best about what they need to stay safe on the job. This frequent failure of employers to listen to their workers – “a lack of worker voice” – is a deep-seated problem in the US, and it has become especially problematic during the current pandemic. If companies paid more attention to their workers’ concerns about safety, would a staggering 890 workers at the Tyson pork plant in Logansport, Indiana, have contracted Covid-19? Would more than 780 workers at the Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota? Would eight workers have died at JBS’s beef-processing plant in Greeley, Colorado?

[ The article is from July, but its relevance increases with the pressure of the pandemic. ]

[keithbvadu2]

1. Is it safe?

[WhiskeyGrinder]

2. Unionizing makes it possible to bargain for better safety protections.

But there are plenty of nurses, teachers and grocery-store workers who are union members and are working in unsafe conditions. But I'm pretty sure direct action from any of those groups wouldn't go over too well.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

4. Union-busting Reaganites reduced the bargaining power of those remaining

Also, from the article:

Under American law, employers are required to listen to their workers only when they have a labor union, but just 11.6% of American workers are represented by unions. As for the other 88.4% of workers, employers don’t have to listen to their views on anything – not safety, not pay, not anything else.

[KentuckyWoman]

3. I grew up and married into union families.

The dismantling of unions has been absolutely devastating to workers and to the social safety net. Even those with union representation often find it to be ineffective because the laws giving workers rights have been destroyed.

I am a very strong advocate of unions. As much as humanly possible I am still a buy union, buy American person. I don't know what we do to get Americans to get back on that wagon....